Ish

Agamemnon and Ajax?

It never ceases to amaze me that, despite having basically made the Ranger into a cornerstone of fantasy fiction, the Dungeons & Dragons game is consistently terrible at making the Ranger into a good class.

So, I at the last game night we were talking about the possibility of an all-mounted knightly army. I poked around Fireforge Games’ website and came up with the following 2,000 Point army for under $100. This list uses one box of Templar Knights and two boxes of Teutonic Knights; the Teutonic Knights come twelve to a box and all their horses have barding; the Templar Knights also come twelve to a box, but with a 6/6 mix of barded and unbarded horses. Use the barded mounts for Heavy Cavalry and the Human Prince (give him a nice hat); use five of the unbarded mounts for the Cavalry; and the final guy takes the sixth unbarded horse and is converted to hold a holy symbol in one hand and a morningstar in the other, he’s your battle cleric. Deus vult! ++ Army Roster [1,980 Points] ++ + Characters + Human Prince [175 Points] (Mounted) Mounted Human Spellcaster [130 Points]: (Level 2, Mounted, Sunblind, Shift) + Units + • Human Cavalry [225 Points]: 5x Figures • Human Heavy Cavalry [450 Points]: 9x Figures • Human Heavy Cavalry [500 Points]: 10x Figures • Human Heavy Cavalry [500 Points]: 10x Figures

Try to track down a copy of the old Rogue Trader era sourcebooks Waaargh! The Orks from 1990 and 1991’s Ere We Go. Both are filled to bursting with Ork background and modeling. Information included the Ork castes and clans, various banners, glyphs, ork language, and (of course) colors. Physical copies sell for a lot of teef on eBay and Amazon, but if you do some googling, you can find PDFs that have been uploaded by various freebooterz.

I was intrigued by the sort of hybrid between Epic 40,000 and Warhammer 40,000 that they used in the most recent iteration of Apocalypse. Basically, when a unit took damage from smaller weapons they rolled their save on a D12; against bigger weapons they rolled their save on a D6. Maybe something similar could be done, where instead of re-rolling dice, you just replace a die with a larger one? So instead of an aura of re-rolling ones, a shooty command character’s aura could make one model in a friendly unit within range replace their D6 to hit with a D12. Likewise, a super-strong mêlée weapon might roll a D12 to wound rather than re-rolling. (Of course, the other sacred cow that needs to be slaughtered is the “roll to hit, roll to wound, roll to save” trifecta. Back when WH40k was a game much smaller in scope [20-30 models per player] then it was a nice bit of granular distinction between accurate-but-weak weapons, tough-but-poorly-armored troops, and so forth. Nowadays, with the much larger scope of the game, it feels like needless faffing about for no real benefit.)

A guide to Saga: Age of Vikings factions.

We few, we happy few, we herd of nerds; For he today that rolls his dice with me Shall be my brother; even if he be a newb, This day shall thin his paints! And gentlemen in galaxy now grimdark, Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their dice unlucky whiles any speaks, That gamed with us upon Oathmark Day!

Marshal Ney leading the charge of the French cavalry, recreated for the 1970 film Waterloo. In the historical battle, Ney’s charge involved 9,000 men in 67 squadrons… and the absolute madman Dino de Laurentis used exactly that many. No CGI. No matte paintings. No camera trickery. Just two divisions of Soviet Red Army troops dressed in British uniforms and damn near ever single man in the Ukraine who knew how to ride a horse acting as the French. Glorious.

I’m going to try to make it for Oathmark.

@Brother GlaciusI was speaking of WWII gaming in general. I don’t have any experience with Bolt Action.

I find Konflict 47 more interesting than Bolt Action, mostly because it’s divorced from the timeline of the actual war. One of the big stumbling blocks for me and WWII gaming is that there is such a drastic difference in technology, weaponry, tactics, and factions depending on which portion of the war (not to mention which theater) you choose to play in. The Polish parachute regiments that jumped into Operation: Market Garden might as well have been alien space elves compared to the Polish army that fought against the Blitz five years earlier…

Aladin the Paladin.

There were a handful of people who played a couple times at the clubhouse, pre-plague.

All units are based on something that’s a multiple of 25: • 25 x 25mm: Units mounted on this size of base can consist of 1–20 figures. The figures must be organized into rows (ranks) of five, with any leftover figures forming the back rank. A full unit of 20 would be a block with four ranks of five figures each. A unit of 13 would be two ranks of five, with one rank of three at the back. • 25 x 50mm: Cavalry generally use this base size. Units mounted on this size of base can consist of 1–10 figures. Again, the figures must be organized into ranks of five, with any leftover figures forming the back rank. The maximum number of figures in a unit of this size is two ranks of five figures each. • 50 x 50mm: Larger creatures, such as trolls, generally use this base size. Units mounted on this size of base can contain 1–3 figures and must be organized into one rank. • 50 x 100mm: Only the largest of monsters, such as dragons, use this base size. Such figures tend to fight as units-of-one. • Mixed: A few units, such as artillery, may contain figures with different base sizes. In such cases, the unit has specific rules for arranging the figures. But, for the most part, the actual base size of the individual figures isn’t nearly as important as the frontage of the overall unit. So if you’ve got a bunch of old WHFB models on 20 x 20 mm squares, Saga figs on 25 mm round, or whatever, just put ‘em on movement trays!

“Unlearning” an old system is always the trickiest part of learning a new system for me.

I love when the canned module gives six pages of intricate history on, like, the family drama of the innkeeper on page one… and three terse sentences about the cult of the archdemon in the dungeon.

Huh… On the one hand, it’s refreshingly straightforward that “backwards means backwards.” On the other hand, decades of playing WHFB and other games have gotten me so used to doing a complicated geometry maths homework exercise every time something like this occurred that it actually feels less intuitive to do things the easy way. It must be a weird variety of Stockholm Syndrome.

I’m hearing very good things about Grimdark Future, but haven’t tried it yet… But, well, you can’t argue with the price.